June 29, 2012 |
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Progressives often find themselves explaining the details of their
preferred policies, and arguing that they would maximize the common good
if enacted. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to eschew the fine
print to embrace sweeping, moral narratives to back their positions. For
the Right, debates over concrete public policies are often framed as
contests between good and evil, freedom and tyranny; that's how, for
example, conservatives can transform a modest 3 percent tax hike on the
wealthiest Americans into pernicious “class warfare” and an intolerable
example of “socialism.”
Call it a "rationality trap." For years, George Lakoff, a cognitive
linguist at the University of California Berkeley, has argued that these
tendencies put progressives at a huge disadvantage in our political
discourse because the human brain simply doesn't process information in
coolly analytical terms. Rather, people judge ideas against a larger
moral framework, and by offering policy analysis rather than morality
tales, liberals go to bat for their policies two strikes down in the
count.
Lakoff and co-author Elisabeth Wehling discuss how these dynamics play
out every day in American political debates in his new book,
The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. He
appeared on this week's AlterNet Radio Hour; below is a lightly edited
transcript of the discussion (you can listen to the whole show
here).
Joshua Holland: George, in the book you talk about what you call
“moral frames.” Can you give us a quick definition of what that is and
how it plays out in our discourse?
George Lakoff: Yes. All politics is moral at the base. Any political
leader who gives you some sort of prescription of what to do does it
because he says it’s right, not because he says it’s wrong or doesn’t
matter. Everybody thinks it’s right.
But there are two different ideas of what right is. This is very
important. Let me give you a short version of this that applies mostly
to economics. The basic idea behind democracy in America is the idea
that citizens care about each other; that they act socially as well as
individually to cash out that care, and they try to do as well as they
can in doing that both for themselves and for others. They do this by
having the government create what we call “the public.” The public
provision of things; things for everybody – roads, bridges, sewers,
public education and public health, like the Centers for Disease
Control. Clean air, clean water, the provision of energy, communications
and so on. These are all the sorts of things that you can’t live a life
without. A private life or a private enterprise. Every business depends
on all of these things. The private depends on the public. That is a
moral issue. That is how we care about each other.
Conservatives have a very different view of democracy, which follows
their moral system. Their moral system is more complex than ours is. The
basic idea in terms of economics is that democracy gives people the
liberty to seek their self interest and their own well-being without
worrying or being responsible for the well-being or interest of anybody
else. Therefore they say everybody has individual responsibility, not
social responsibility, therefore you’re on your own. If you make it
that’s wonderful. That’s what the market is about. If you don’t make it,
that’s your problem.
Those are two opposite views of a moral system applied to economics.
Those are straightforward, everyday examples. They apply very
interestingly in the case of privatization. The right says, 'privatize
as much as possible. Get rid of as much of the public as you possibly
can. Make everything private if possible.' The other side says no. The
public requires hiring private contractors all the time -- to build
roads or public buildings -- but there’s a limit. And the limit has to
do with morality. When it comes to moral issues like education, health
or the environment -- which has everything to do with morality and
people caring about each other -- there you don’t put that in private
hands for private profit. That is the line that needs to be drawn.
Those are truths that are deeply embedded in the point of view of a
progressive morality. There are other truths that are from conservative
morality. They’re opposites, and because they’re opposites you’re going
to get conflict. One thing that’s important to understand is that most
people have a little of both. Most people are conservative about some
things and progressive about others. Some people are almost all
progressive and some are almost all conservative.
But there are a lot of people who are mixed and they’re called
moderates or centrists, though there is no explicit ideology of the
moderation. There’s no ideology of the independent or the swing voter.
What you have are two different moral systems in the same brain which
inhibit each other. One is active and the other is inactive. Activity in
one turns off the other. The more one is active the stronger it gets
and the weaker the other one gets.
What’s happened in this country is that language activates that moral
system. The moral system is realized in frames. Frames are conceptual
structures that we use to think in context. Language is defined in terms
of those frames. When you use language that is conservative it’ll
activate conservative frames which in turn activates conservative moral
systems and strengthens those systems in people’s brains. That’s been
happening for the past three decades. Conservatives have a remarkable
communication system and a language system that they’ve constructed.
They get out there and use their language and frames and repeat them
over and over. The more they repeat it the greater their effect on
people’s brains. Democrats don’t do that and as a result the
conservatives have framed almost every issue.
What T
he Little Blue Book does is show how to deal with that.
How to understand your own moral frames and how to see deep truths that
conservative frames hide. For example: that the private depends on the
public.
JH: I think this is a really important point that you get at in the
book – that people don’t evaluate issues in isolation. Sometimes you’ll
see the polling on something -- one example is that overwhelming
majorities of people, even those who identify as conservative, say the
government should do more to alleviate poverty. But when you get into
specific policies that would achieve that end, you find very different
results.
You write, “when you mention a specific issue all of the frames and
values higher up in the hierarchy are also activated. They define the
moral context of the issue.”
So, are we all just fooling ourselves when we cite public opinion on
some issue or another, and assuming that people will rationally support
politicians who agree with us on those issues?
GL: Yes, you’re fooling yourself. Let me give you some striking
examples of that. A lot of it depends on how the questions in the poll
will be framed. When Obama was elected, before he took office, he had
his pollster go out and check to see what possible provisions of a
healthcare plan people would like. It turned out the provisions like
capping expenses, or covering people with preconditions, or allowing
your children to be on your healthcare plan when you go to college --
everybody liked those, like 60 to 80 percent of people, and they still
do.
What was interesting is that conservatives never attacked them.
Conservatives never came out and said we shouldn't cover preconditions
or you shouldn’t have your children on your healthcare plan. They didn’t
attack any of those provisions. What they did is they went to morality,
as it is from their perspective. They said we’re going to have two
moral principles here, freedom and life. From their perspective this was
a government takeover and there were death panels. And they repeated
government takeover and death panels over and over until a lot of the
public – people who liked all of the provisions of the plan -- were now
against the plan. The plan got minority support.
So here you have the president come out week after week, and David
Axelrod coming out, saying this is a wonderful plan and here are the
provisions. David Axelrod at one point sent out a memo to all the people
on the Obama list -- 13 million -- saying go to your neighbors and here
are 24 points of the plan to remember, but just to make it easier there
are three groups of eight. Nobody remembers those three groups of
eight. Meanwhile the other guys are saying government takeover and death
panels.
JH: A while back, I interviewed Richard Viguerie, who is a longtime
conservative activist. He said something very interesting to me. He said
that his fellow travelers were descendants of monarchists, and as a
result, they were very receptive to top-down messaging strategy in a way
that liberals are not.
We do see this again and again where you get very similar talking
points from the lowest level of the conservative blogosphere to members
of the Senate Republican Caucus. Is there a tendency for liberals or
progressive people to not be as easily swayed by messages that are
coming from above?
GL: No. They’re just as easily swayed. Turn on MSNBC and you’ll hear
the same messages every night. You get talking points from the DNC and
they’re all about policies. You’re going to talk about this policy and
that policy and so on, but you’re not going to talk about morality.
There was a period when I was involved with a think tank called the
Rockridge Institute, and MoveOn, when it was a young organization, asked
its members for the 2004 election what they wanted to see in the future
of the country. They thought they would get hundreds and hundreds of
new proposals. They had people pair up and have a discourse about the
kinds of things they wanted to see. We got a big stack of all these
things and started going through them. After about the first half inch,
they were all the same. Everybody said the same thing.
If you go and look at progressive foundations and look at their mission
statements there are between a dozen and two dozens things they all
say, and then they’re all the same. Progressive are just the same as
conservatives on it, but they don’t know how to communicate their
messages. What they wind up doing is talking about policies, rather than
the moral basis of those policies.
JH: I think one of the most important trends in our politics these
days is the mainstreaming of extremism on the Right. I certainly
remember when Bill Clinton was in office you had these militia guys
running around. There were these crazy conspiracy theories – Clinton was
accused of drug trafficking and murdering a bunch of his political
opponents. Those views were kind of consigned to the fringe -- your
crazy right-wing uncle would forward chain emails with this stuff.
Now you see politicians like Michele Bachmann who believe that
energy efficient lightbulbs are some sort of UN plot to undermine the
free enterprise system. You have elected politicians going on Fox and
saying that Obama wasn’t born in this country. In the book, you talk
about this trend. How does this new extremism fit into your analogy
about families? You've long said that conservatives look toward a strict
father figure in governance, and liberals tend to embrace a more
nurturing parent model.
GL: This goes back to 1996 to a book I wrote called
Moral Politics,
which talks about that at great length. The idea is this: we understand
that we have two very different family models in this country. They
rise from two different understandings of morality. Morality as
nurturing and morality as obedience to legitimate authority. Those give
rise to different types of families. A strict father family has a father
who is the ultimate authority which cannot be challenged. His job is to
teach kids right from wrong, assuming he knows that, and his wife’s job
is to uphold his views. The children are taught right from wrong by
punishment, and painful enough punishment so that they’ll try to
discipline themselves to do right and not wrong. And then if they have
that discipline they can go out into the world and be prosperous. If
they’re not prosperous that means they’re not disciplined and so they
deserve their poverty.
This idea projects onto every aspect of social life, not just to our
national life but also onto the market, onto religion, onto foreign
policy, the military and so on. What that does is create a very
different view than progressives have about all of these things. When
you have a lot of people with both of these views -- we all grow up with
both of them there -- each one is in a neural circuit. That neural
circuit is in mutual opposition to another neural circuit. Each of those
two inhibit each other. When one of those circuits is activated over
and over, more than the other, the stronger it gets and the weaker the
inactive one gets. The stronger one of these circuits gets, the more
influence it’s going to have over various issues.
What has happened over the years since the “Gingrich revolution” is
that he worked to get rid of candidates in the Republican Party who were
partly progressive. He made them as conservative as possible and he got
conservative messaging. That messaging went unchallenged by Democrats.
They just responded with policies. So the conservative messages have
been getting stronger over the years and conservative populism has been
growing because there are a lot of working people in this country,
especially men, who are strict fathers at home. Those ideas of “family
values” can then be extended into political, economic and religious
ideas. That’s what’s happened.
There has been more and more of an audience for conservatism because
those ideas become stronger in the brain because of the media control of
the Right. It’s not illegitimate media control. The Left could do just
as well but they don’t because they don’t know how to speak in moral
terms. What happens is that as the parts of those people’s brains gets
stronger you get more and more extreme conservatism. That’s not
surprising. It just follows from the fact that they have a very strong
and communicative system that Democrats don’t and don’t want to put into
effect. That has been a very effective system. The way that people’s
brains work will just give this result.
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